David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

First, there were Spider and Peeps-two petty cons hit within a few weeks of each other. Then came one of Naples’s drivers, shot as he changed a tire in his driveway, and a crony of Peeps’s, who was gunned down outside his apartment. Then John Magda, who was discovered, his head wrapped in tape, at the dump in Struthers, and, next, a small-time bookie who refused to go easily-he was first bombed and later shot through his living-room window as he watched television with his wife. Then Joey DeRose, Sr., killed by accident when he was mistaken for his son, Joey DeRose, Jr., a Carabbia assassin; and, finally, a few months later, the son, too. “Oh my God, they got Joey,” his girlfriend screamed when police told her they had found the car he was driving burning on a country road between Cleveland and Akron.

In 1976, Kroner arrived in Youngstown and descended into this violent underworld. He was a former high-school math teacher who turned in his books for a badge in 1971, and who could be seen around town, in his neatly pressed suit and tie, trailing reputed hit men and banging on the doors of the All-American Club and other Mafia hangouts. Though he came from a family of cops, which included his father, Kroner didn’t look like one: he was too tall and slender, almost delicate, and he lacked the easy manner of the police who played craps in the shadow of the courthouse. He wore penny loafers in a city where most people wore boots, and spoke with a certain formality.

His F.B.I. predecessor, according to the agency’s own affidavit and informants, had allegedly consorted with gangsters, and was later appointed Youngstown’s chief of police at the Mafia’s behest. But Kroner was hostile to the local dons. Prickly and shy, he spent hours alone in his small office, smoking cigarettes and listening to intercepted conversations between the different factions. Like a cartographer filling in the blanks on a map, he made little diagrams of each family, to which he added further details whenever he received a tip from an informant. He did everything he could to bring down the Mafia’s enterprise: tapping its members’ phones, tailing their spotless Cadillacs, subpoenaing their friends. Before long, Strollo and his cronies gave him the ultimate epithet: “motherfucker.”

In December of 1980, Charlie the Crab, the head of the Cleveland faction, disappeared without a trace, and, soon after, Kroner searched the apartment of one of the city’s most notorious assassins. The apartment was cluttered with knickknacks, and Kroner and his partner went through each room carefully. In a cabinet, Kroner noticed a breadbox and opened it. Inside, tucked amid the stale bread, was an audiotape. When he played it, he heard male voices, saying, “He’s a scared motherfucker” and “You either play our fucking game or you[’re] going to be put in a fucking box.” Two of the voices, Kroner was sure, belonged to Charlie and his brother, Orlie the Crab. There was also another voice, one Kroner thought he recognized from television and radio. Then it dawned on him: it was James Traficant, a former college football star, who had recently been elected sheriff of Youngstown.

Later, Kroner and his partner, acting on a tip, drilled open the Carabbias’ sister’s safe-deposit box, where they found a similar tape with a handwritten note. It said, “If I die these tapes go to the F.B.I. in Washington. I feel I have more people after me because of these tapes and… I pray and ask God to guide and protect my family.”

Back at headquarters, Kroner and his colleagues listened to a jumble of voices on the tape arguing about which public officials they thought were allegedly being paid off by the rival Pittsburgh Mob.

“You believe they got all them fuckin’ people?” Orlie said.

“I know they got” him, Traficant said, referring to one prominent politician.

“Oh, they definitely got” him, Charlie said.

Traficant paused, as if running through other names in his mind. “I don’t know all of them,” he finally said. “But I know it’s a fuckin’ fistful.”

With its Pittsburgh rival controlling many of the valley’s politicians, the Cleveland faction knew it needed some powerful representatives of its own. And the tapes, apparently made by Charlie the Crab at two meetings during the 1980 sheriff’s campaign, appeared to show them buying Traficant. “I am a loyal fucker,” Traficant informed the Carabbia brothers, “and my loyalty is here, and now we’ve gotta set up the business that they’ve run for all these fuckin’ years and swing that business over to you, and that’s what your concern is. That’s why you financed me, and I understand that.”

The arrangement appeared to be an old-fashioned one: Traficant acknowledged receiving more than a hundred thousand dollars from the Cleveland faction for his campaign; in exchange, he indicated that he would use the sheriff’s office to protect the Carabbias’ rackets while shutting down their rivals.

Charlie told Traficant, “Your uncle Tony was my goombah… and we feel that you’re like a brother to us. We don’t want you to make any fuckin’ mistakes.” Traficant assured his benefactors that he was solid, and that if any of his deputies betrayed them “they’ll fuckin’ come up swimming in [the] Mahoning River.”

But, according to the tapes, Traficant was not worried primarily about his deputies; he was worried about the Pittsburgh Mob. As Charlie knew, Traficant had accepted money from Pittsburgh, too-some sixty thousand dollars. (The first installment had come with the message “I want you to be my friend.”) The young candidate for sheriff was now double-crossing the Pittsburgh family: he had just given over at least some of its money to Charlie the Crab in order to prove his loyalty, and he knew that when the Pittsburgh family found out it would retaliate. “Look, I don’t wanna fuckin’ die in six months, Charlie,” Traficant said.

Kroner and his colleagues could hear Traficant hatching a plan to protect himself from the Pittsburgh Mafia and the officials they controlled. “Let’s look at it this way, O.K.?” he said. “They can get to the judges and get what they need done… What they don’t have is the sheriff, and… I’m one step ahead.” On the day he was sworn into office, Traficant said he’d take some of the money the Pittsburgh family had given him and use it as evidence to arrest them for bribery. What’s more, Traficant rehearsed what he and the Crabs would say if their secret dealings were ever uncovered by the authorities: “I was so fucking pissed off at this crooked government, I came to you and asked you guys if you would assist me to break it up, and you said, ‘Fuck it… we’ll do it.’ O.K.? That’s gonna be what you’re gonna say in court.”

“Orlie, too?” Charlie asked. “He’s got a bad heart-”

“Look… I’m not talking fucking daydreams,” Traficant said. “If they’re gonna fuck with me, I’m gonna nail them.” Traficant was taken with the audacity of his plan. “If you think about it,” he mused, “if I fuckin’ did that-”

“You can run for governor,” Charlie said.

They all broke into laughter.

After Kroner and his superiors reviewed the tapes, they called Traficant down to headquarters. Kroner had never met the sheriff before, and he watched as he settled into the chair across from him. Traficant, who was forty-one years old and had once worked in the mills, was an imposing figure, with wide shoulders and a flamboyant, brown toupee that stuck up on top. Kroner told Traficant that he had watched him play quarterback at the University of Pittsburgh. (An N.F.L. scout once said that Traficant, “at the most critical point in a game,” would “keep the ball himself and run with it,” bowling over anyone in his path.)